VA voids union contracts for 400K workers, prompting backlash

The Department of Veterans Affairs is voiding union contracts for more than 400,000 workers, part of the Trump administration’s bid to weaken organized labor in the federal bureaucracy.

Affected employees include doctors, nurses, benefits administrators — everyone at the VA except for roughly 4,000 police officers, firefighters and security guards.

The VA framed the decision Wednesday as enabling it to “promote high-performing employees, hold poor performers accountable and improve benefits and services to America’s veterans.”

Workers covered by collective bargaining spent upward of 750,000 paid hours on union activities last year, according to the agency. In addition, the VA said union representatives took up more than 187,000 square feet of clinical and office space.

The agency also expressed frustration with unions representing VA workers — the American Federation of Government Employees being the largest.

“Too often, unions that represent VA employees fight against the best interests of veterans while protecting and rewarding bad workers,” VA Secretary Doug Collins said in a statement.

The VA looked to the first Trump administration for examples. It accused some unions of opposing 2017 laws that strengthened VA infrastructure and added protections for whistleblowers within the agency.

Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, hit back in a statement of his own, calling the end of collective bargaining for most VA workers “another clear example of retaliation” for criticism of the administration’s “illegal, anti-worker and anti-veteran policies.”

Kelley specifically pointed to since-scrapped plans to slash 83,000 jobs at the VA and several rural medical facilities in the system.

Lori Lydic, president of the union’s Local 2028 in Pittsburgh, did not return a request for comment on Thursday.

Four other unions represent workers at the VA: the National Association of Government Employees, the National Federation of Federal Employees, the National Nurses Organizing Committee/National Nurses United and the Service Employees International Union.

Downsizing has been a fact of life at the VA, even if officials abandoned their plans for mass layoffs. The agency says it’s on track to lose nearly 30,000 employees by October through attrition, retirement and resignation.

The Veterans Affairs Pittsburgh Healthcare System workforce is set to shrink by 174 workers this year, director Donald Koenig told TribLive last month.

It did not immediately respond to questions about how terminating union contracts will impact its workers.

The Pittsburgh VA employs more than 4,500 workers. Numbers provided by the national agency suggest an overwhelming majority of them just lost their labor agreements.

U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, D-Fox Chapel, sees the attack on collective bargaining as opening the door to further staff cuts. A former Navy officer, Deluzio has been especially active in criticizing changes to the VA.

“Union busting the hardworking men and women at the VA — many of whom are veterans themselves — is all part of their plan to make it easier to fire VA workers so that they can keep privatizing and outsourcing care,” Deluzio said in a statement.

Another veteran representing Western Pennsylvania in Congress, Guy Reschenthaler, R-Peters, did not immediately return a request for comment.

Wednesday’s announcement fulfills a March executive order signed by President Donald Trump and challenged in court by unions that seeks to strip about 1 million federal workers of collective bargaining rights.

A federal appeals court last week lifted an injunction blocking the order.